These days, landing pages are being used very frequently, even though they have evolved from the cheesy designs and glaring oddities.

Modern day landing pages come with sexy designs and the best compelling copies, that can convince you in seconds.

We’ve seen many good examples of modern, sleek looking landing pages, which are eye candies but when it comes to search engine optimization, I’ve seen that not all of them are fool-proof. Which is what we would discuss here today.

1. Its not about one keyword anymore, focus on the contextual category !

Earlier, you could get away with search engines by optimizing for one keyword and rearranging all the stemmed keywords around it. Like “seo tips, seo optimization, seo google” and things like that.

But clearly, search engines have evolved a lot. The wise thing to do is to spread out your list of keywords along a plain path. This is different from “stemming”, where a core keyword is repeated with combination keywords in and around the page.

Doing so, might not harm you but it wouldn’t stand a chance to get the attention it deserves with the search engines as it will fit safely into the brackets of the “old school stemming agenda”.

So, the key is to diversify your keywords, and focus on the category and context rather than a single keyword.

2. Repetition and keyword density is not the key, but relevance is

As mentioned in the earlier point, one could easy get away with repeating the targeted keyword to a calculated average density and get picked up by search engines.

But the relevancy factor has gone ahead of this simple criteria and now revolves around metrics such as relevancy, context, references and traction.

Search engine robots are clever enough to figure out if the copy was written for search engines or otherwise, from scanning it, so don’t make the evident mistakes of focusing too much on one or a few set of keywords.

Instead of focusing on “Red apple, Blue Apple, Green Apple”, one might want to focus more on “Apples, Orchards, Fruits” and the like.

3. Do not completely disregard the Old school SEO, certain parts still work.

Like code optimization, clean code and semantic markup. Make sure that you use the core concepts like the Page Titles, Heading tags and all the SEO basics in place without ignoring them.

4. Cool graphics are alright but also optimize the code accordingly.

Search Engines have evolved much to figure out how to parse and scan heavy graphics and multimedia content, but the page load time is one such important factor you might not want to ignore. If you have heavy graphics make arrangements to make them load fast. Quick delivery is a key factors as we’ve seen Google put too much focus on it lately.

5. Highlight the best parts that needs focus in the content.

There are more than one way of doing it but one way I’d personally recommend doing is to highlight important phrases (that gives contextuality to the content) by including them cleverly in to the heading copy and interlinking them with the page with anchor text, particularly if its a long page.

Search Engines are picking up “inter-page links” these days and if not a direct clue, definitely passes a signal about the content to search engines.

Apart from these points, the regular search engine optimization strategies can be employed and social media can be used to bring in some traction to the page.

Gone are those days when you build a good foundation and leave it at that for the search engines to pick up and say “Wow, this is amazing stuff”.

These days, they say a lot of amazing pages, so the key is to make them say “Ah ! This is a better one among the lot, and its popular too, let’s pick this up”.

If they do, is there anything to learn from it ? Is it different from the regular basic SEO ?

Let’s find out if we have answers for the questions above.

Do popular blogs have to follow SEO in the first place ?

One argument I’ve repeatedly come across is that if your blog is popular, then you don’t need to really work on the SEO part.

Very fair observation that but I can’t completely agree, though I’d love to.

The reason is that this is a chicken-egg problem. Do you have to first do SEO and then get the site popular, or get the site popular first then do the SEO.

In my opinion, SEO comes first irrespective of whether you’re popular or not.

SEO is one of the basic foundations of a website and I can’t think of a reason why it should be ignored.

Anyways, the fact is that many popular blogs, while they want to focus more on content, the SEO basics are well taken care of. Let’s dig deeper.

1. Healthy publishing frequency

One of the major signals to Google, about the authority of your blog is higher publishing frequency.

If your blog can churn out 25 quality post a day, that’s no amateur blog.

Note that the number is not the sole factor here but the quality factor of each of them.

There are several “splogs” out there that copy content from popular blogs from their RSS feeds. But none of them can be counted as “authoritative” as their content is copied and duplicate.

If an upcoming blog, can match up to the biggies with good publishing frequency and original content, then you automatically get upped to a better authority/trust level with Google.

2. Efficient Interlinking

If you look at any popular blog out there, you’ll see that most of them rely heavily on keyword based interlinking. This means that a clever strategy is behind the whole scene.

Interlinking can be done in many ways. From simple “Read more” links to proper keyword based deep linking.

The idea is to use the homepage’s massive authority and leverage it onto inside pages, interlinking them with well targeted keywords.

3. Getting the basics right

The crux of the matter is that with all that overload of content coming in, its impossible to always check for keyword densities and keyword research indexes.

Instead, the way out is to create a good basic foundation built strong on SEO and then let everything else fall into place by itself.

Many of the popular blogs have the basic SEO metrics covered well in advance even before going full swing with their content.

Good amount of time spent building a solid foundation based on SEO is worth all the time you’d spent on it later.

4. No unnecessary focus on keywords

If you watch closely, unlike SEOs who sometimes appear to others as a little too obsessive about keywords, popular blogs do not really focus much on the keywords to the extent of repeating them unnecessarily for the sake of keyword density.

Instead, the popular blogs only ensure that the content they publish is unique, rich and social media friendly, not entirely SEO friendly.

Even if the authors wanted to, not all the time could they do an SEO formula check on articles. So beyond the basic title/headline optimization I cannot see a scope for detailed keyword analysis or focus.

5. Efficient control of Crawlable space

As a part of getting the basics right, content focused blogs have a huge challenge in front of them, that of managing the bots.

As important as creating search engine friendly content is, it is also important to manage the bots and controlling them into crawling certain spaces while clearing out others.

Webmasters essentially have to have a good grasp about what part of their website is important and what not.

If that sounds rude, what part is search engine material and what is not.

So, to help the search engine bots crawl those pages/part of the site that’s search engine material, its essential to control them using advanced SEO tool such as Robots.txt files, Nofollow/NoIndex tags etc.

Summary

Essentially, the idea is that popular or not, you need to have the SEO basics in place to build a website, and as and when your blog gets popular, there might be restrictions to the possibility of going into details of keyword research and competition.

But the fact is that if you have a good sound SEO foundation, then things will fall into place with the content building in on top of everything.

However, the focus should be on building authority and trust with Google with popular, shareable and quality content.